Gardening/Growing

Gardening—the cultivation of flowers, fruits, and vegetables on enclosed pieces of ground—has a long and varied history. It ranges from being a practical activity that supplies people and households with fruits, vegetables, and herbs, to being a multifaceted and elaborate leisure pursuit characterized by ornamental and ostentatious landscape design techniques. Gardening also varies from being a personal and individual experience to being a social and community activity, although the boundaries are becoming blurred. In recent years, gardening has come to play a major role in environmental and sustainability issues.

Gardening is one of the most popular pastime activities in the United States and Europe. In 2007, according to research conducted by the National Gardening Association, a nonprofit organization that promotes gardening education, an estimated 82 million households, or 71 percent of all U.S. households, participated in at least one type of garden activity. The average spent was $428. The growth and expansion of gardening centers, which range from small businesses to big box retail stores like Home Depot, Lowe's, and Wal-Mart, as well as the proliferation of gardening clubs and associations, television and radio shows hosted by celebrity gardeners, newspaper columns, specialized magazines, seed catalogs, books, videos, Websites, and blogs devoted to gardening all attest to the popularity of gardening.

The growth in gardening as a leisure activity is bound up with changing consumption patterns and the commoditization of nature by the constantly expanding lawn and garden industry. Although gardens, garden design, and gardening have become ubiquitous lifestyle matters that have been branded as an aspect of modern consumer culture, there is an ongoing tension between gardening as a leisurely pursuit in which individuals seek personal fulfillment through acts of privatized green consumption and gardening as a social movement based on creating a sense of community and a new relationship between people and the natural environment.